Page 52 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 37

he elaborates even further, saying, "He is at liberty to find a gourd in
which to keep his meal, or he can eat his corn from the cob, just as he
pleases," again finding a cutting irony in these supposed freedoms, since
what they equally imply is that lacking the gourd, there is nothing in
which to store the meal, and lacking a knife, the "choice" is to eat the
corn from the cob or not at all.
It was for the most part slaveowners who decided what their human
chattel would consume, and to some extent their control extended to
when and how food, tools, and leisure could be used. When Northrup
arrived at the slave plantation where he worked, his first task was to
carve his own axe and hoe handles (121). Thus, even in the pre- or proto-
industrial conditions of the plantation South, slaves had little free access
to the essential elements of consumption. Their labor and their wages
were largely controlled by slaveowners and the marketplace was a sphere
most slaves could enter most easily as commodities rather than as pur-
chasers of commodities.
The politics of eating among enslaved populations were nothing if
not complex. Slaveholders were obligated to provide rations, which
though they have varied according to historical period and geographic
area were usually meager—just enough to keep slaves from starving ut-
terly. Most accounts show that typical rations included cornmeal,
bacon, and perhaps a bit of salt (e.g., Clifton 1978, xxxiii). With work
schedules arduous and long, little time was left for cooking other than
making a cornmeal and water mush that might be made into ash cakes,
quickly cooked in the morning's or evening's embers. Hoe cakes, similar
to ash cakes, were so called because, lacking proper pots and pans,
many slaves made their iron hoe blades do double duty as a kind of skil-
let (and, incidentally, triple duty as a musical instrument). For field
hands especially, plantation provisions provided poor nutrition and
barely enough calories to support the hard labor of cane cutting, cotton
sowing, or rice planting.
Both archaeological work and slave narratives show that rations were
almost always supplemented by hunting, scavenging, small garden plots,
4
and occasional pilfering or theft (Genovese 1974; Singleton 1995). This
"theft" might be of time, labor, or the food itself. Bondsmen who hunted
or fished on land owned by their masters or some other person were, in
effect, stealing fish and game. These activities were overlooked, or not,
thus establishing a dynamic by which whites could define the consump-
tion of blacks as illegal, or not, depending on convenience. Enduring im-
ages of slaves sneaking into henhouses and melon patches have evolved